The Mirror Principle

Working class hero, middle class intellectual, upper class twit -- those kind of classifications are a peculiarly British pre-occupation. During 13 tough years in Japan I was subject to a much simpler form of discrimination: foreigner, one who doesn’t belong here. I was supposed to carry at all times an “alien registration card.” Even after marrying my Japanese wife, I still had to go once a year to stand in a long line of fellow aliens, to be treated like scum by Japanese immigration officials.

Over the past couple of years one of the things that has become increasingly clear to me is what I have referred to in these blogs as “the mirror principle.”

The spark for this insight came from noticing people’s response to a recent Dharma-heir of Gudo Nishijima’s called James Cohen -- a New York lawyer called Cohen... the mind already begins to put him in a certain class, to reach for the filing cabinet and pull out a stereotype marked “New York Jewish lawyer.”

What I noticed in myself was a hatred of his insincerity, his pushing himself forward as a Zen master when he evidently is nothing of the kind. Where does this hatred arise, for a person who I have never even met? It comes from my own fear. What is my deepest fear? That I am not the real deal, not the genuine article. That not only am I fraud who knows he is a fraud but also that, in all kinds of ways, I am a fraud who does not know he is a fraud -- just like Cohen.

Why did Adolf Hitler manifest such overt hatred for Jews? The answer was provided, to my satisfaction anyway, by a reader of this blog who pointed me to the work of Alice Miller. According to Ms Miller, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Adolf’s father was the illegitimate son of a Jewish merchant, that Adolf’s mother was the Jewish merchant’s housemaid. Thus, the mirror principle may have been working again: what Hitler feared within himself -- his being a dirty Jew -- he saw reflected outside himself, and hated it.

What did Master Dogen fear in himself? He tells us in Shobogenzo that what he feared most was losing the will to the truth. And for whom does Master Dogen reserve his most venemous criticism? For monks who pervert the Buddha’s true teaching in order to get their own fame and profit -- he calls those monks dogs who want to eat and drink the shit and piss of lay people.

What does Gudo Nishijima fear might be wrong in himself? I think he fears his own intellectual tendency, his own idealistic tendency, his own bookish tendency, his own tendency to think too much. Herein lies the cause of his big mistake.

When I began to understand, from 1994 onwards, the key role that thinking plays in Zazen, and began to advocate thinking in Zazen, Gudo reacted to me as if I were his enemy, and the enemy of Buddhism.

Shortly, however, I think that Gudo will recognize his mistake, and declare so publicly. Instead of opposing, he will begin to support my mission to clarify the fundamental meaning in Zazen of feeling, thinking, and action. That will be a big change, with which I will have to cope. There is always something in us, isn’t there?, that doesn’t like change.